UCLA In the News May 8, 2018

“Police violence disproportionately impacts young people, and the young people affected are disproportionately people of color,” Anthony Bui of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues wrote. (Also: Independent [U.K.], Quartz, Reuters)

[UCLA’s] Eugene Volokh heard about the case from the defendant’s lawyer long before the public and concluded that the sealing violated the 1st Amendment and state law requiring that justice be administered openly. “I found no justification for the sealing,” he said in an interview Monday. “There are also no available documents to explain the sealing.”

According to a 2014 UCLA study, California is the least affordable state and Los Angeles is the least affordable city for renters in the nation. A third of Angelenos spend more than half their income on rent. When housing costs are factored in, one in four of us lives in poverty.

(Commentary written by UCLA’s Lynn Vavreck) Donald J. Trump’s rise to the GOP nomination and eventual presidential victory gave heft to the idea that extreme candidates can beat moderates by galvanizing their party’s base. That premise is shaping competitive races in both parties. But an analysis of more than 30 years of House general elections suggests the opposite.

UCLA statistics and epidemiology professor Sander Greenland helped me consider the importance of false negatives. He said that the tendency to produce false positives or negatives varies from one field to another, and may depend on the incentives faced by researchers.

As beautiful and poetic as the work we experience onstage, the profound experience is what happens in the audience. Through small gestures — the passing of a ribbon of text from your neighbor, the speaking of a circled word, the moving together — it feels as if the audience is being woven and cared for through the piece. And it feels like we need it — desperately. Go on this journey — you won’t regret it. Given the size of the audience, “the theater is a blank page” [at Royce Hall as part of UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance] is going to be a tough ticket.

The questions, based on the UCLA Loneliness Scale, looked at factors like social separation from society. A curious discovery? Researchers at the health service firm Cigna, in conjunction with research partner Ipsos, say there is no connection between social media use and feelings of isolation and loneliness.

“Unfortunately, the Juul is just another e-cigarette reiteration that dispenses the same old chemicals, including addictive nicotine. These chemicals are not harmless,” says Dr. Holly Middlekauff. She is a professor of medicine (cardiology) and physiology at UCLA who studies the health effects of e-cigarettes.

Study authors Dr. David Wong, professor of oral biology and associate dean for research at the UCLA School of Dentistry, and Dr. Wenyuan Shi, chief executive officer and chief science officer at the Forsyth Institute, an oral health research institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, asked the question of whether our RNA — the cellular messengers — can communicate with harmful bacteria in the mouth…. “This study establishes that there is a clear channel of communication between RNA messengers and bacteria in our mouth,” said Wong. “Furthermore, we have shown that these messengers may play an important role in mediating interactions between bacteria and their host.”

Dr. Maria Garcia-Lloret, a pediatric allergist at the UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital, explains that certain symptoms characteristic of learning disabilities or behavioral problems, such as fidgeting and difficulty concentrating, can arise from a child’s discomfort due to seasonal allergies. “I often see children whose allergy symptoms make them so irritated they’re uncomfortable sitting still or are constantly touching their face,” says Garcia-Lloret. “These children may also have headaches and brain fog that’s due to nasal congestion and sinus pressure.”